Artificial Intelligence or AI is a field of Data Science that trains computers to learn from experience, adjust to inputs, and perform tasks of certain cognitive levels. Over the last few years, AI has emerged as a significant data science function and, by utilizing advanced algorithms and computing power, AI is transforming the functional, operational, and strategic landscape of various business domains. AI algorithms are designed to make decisions, often using real-time data. Using sensors, digital data, and even remote inputs, AI algorithms combine information from a variety of different sources, analyze the data instantly, and act on the insights derived from the data. Most AI technologies – from advanced recommendation engines to self-driving cars – rely on diverse deep learning models. By utilizing these complex models, AI professionals are able to train computers to accomplish specific tasks by recognizing patterns in the data. Analytics India Magazine (AIM), in association with Jigsaw Academy, has developed this study on the Artificial Intelligence market to understand the developments of the AI market in India, covering the market in terms of Industry and Company Type. Moreover, the study delves into the market size of the different categories of AI and Analytics startups / boutique firms. As a part of the broad Data Science domain, the Artificial Intelligence technology function has so far been classified as an emerging technology segment. Moreover, the AI market in India has, till now, been dominated by the MNC Technology and the GIC or Captive firms. Domestic firms, Indian startups, and even International Technology startups across various sectors have, so far, not made a significant investment, in terms of operations and scale, in the Indian AI market. Additionally, IT services and Boutique AI & Analytics firms had not, till a couple of years ago, developed full-fledged AI offerings in India for their clients.

A question answering system that in addition to providing an answer provides an explanation of the reasoning that leads to that answer has potential advantages in terms of debuggability, extensibility and trust. To this end, we propose QED, a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering. A QED explanation specifies the relationship between a question and answer according to formal semantic notions such as referential equality, sentencehood, and entailment. We describe and publicly release an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Google Natural Questions dataset, and report baseline models on two tasks -- post-hoc explanation generation given an answer, and joint question answering and explanation generation. In the joint setting, a promising result suggests that training on a relatively small amount of QED data can improve question answering. In addition to describing the formal, language-theoretic motivations for the QED approach, we describe a large user study showing that the presence of QED explanations significantly improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors made by a strong neural QA baseline.

Agent-based methods allow for defining simple rules that generate complex group behaviors. The governing rules of such models are typically set a priori and parameters are tuned from observed behavior trajectories. Instead of making simplifying assumptions across all anticipated scenarios, inverse reinforcement learning provides inference on the short-term (local) rules governing long term behavior policies by using properties of a Markov decision process. We use the computationally efficient linearly-solvable Markov decision process to learn the local rules governing collective movement for a simulation of the self propelled-particle (SPP) model and a data application for a captive guppy population. The estimation of the behavioral decision costs is done in a Bayesian framework with basis function smoothing. We recover the true costs in the SPP simulation and find the guppies value collective movement more than targeted movement toward shelter.

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are being increasingly deployed for commercial, civilian, and military applications. The current UAS state-of-the-art still depends on a remote human controller with robust wireless links to perform several of these applications. The lack of autonomy restricts the domains of application and tasks for which a UAS can be deployed. Enabling autonomy and intelligence to the UAS will help overcome this hurdle and expand its use improving safety and efficiency. The exponential increase in computing resources and the availability of large amount of data in this digital era has led to the resurgence of machine learning from its last winter. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss how some of the advances in machine learning, specifically deep learning and reinforcement learning can be leveraged to develop next-generation autonomous UAS. We first begin motivating this chapter by discussing the application, challenges, and opportunities of the current UAS in the introductory section. We then provide an overview of some of the key deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques discussed throughout this chapter. A key area of focus that will be essential to enable autonomy to UAS is computer vision. Accordingly, we discuss how deep learning approaches have been used to accomplish some of the basic tasks that contribute to providing UAS autonomy. Then we discuss how reinforcement learning is explored for using this information to provide autonomous control and navigation for UAS. Next, we provide the reader with directions to choose appropriate simulation suites and hardware platforms that will help to rapidly prototype novel machine learning based solutions for UAS. We additionally discuss the open problems and challenges pertaining to each aspect of developing autonomous UAS solutions to shine light on potential research areas.

This paper develops Bayesian econometric methods for posterior and predictive inference in a non-parametric mixed frequency VAR using additive regression trees. We argue that regression tree models are ideally suited for macroeconomic nowcasting in the face of the extreme observations produced by the pandemic due to their flexibility and ability to model outliers. In a nowcasting application involving four major countries in the European Union, we find substantial improvements in nowcasting performance relative to a linear mixed frequency VAR. A detailed examination of the predictive densities in the first six months of 2020 shows where these improvements are achieved.

The objective of this study is to create and test a hybrid deep learning model, FastGRNN-FCN (Fast, Accurate, Stable and Tiny Gated Recurrent Neural Network-Fully Convolutional Network), for urban flood prediction and situation awareness using channel network sensors data. The study used Harris County, Texas as the testbed, and obtained channel sensor data from three historical flood events (e.g., 2016 Tax Day Flood, 2016 Memorial Day flood, and 2017 Hurricane Harvey Flood) for training and validating the hybrid deep learning model. The flood data are divided into a multivariate time series and used as the model input. Each input comprises nine variables, including information of the studied channel sensor and its predecessor and successor sensors in the channel network. Precision-recall curve and F-measure are used to identify the optimal set of model parameters. The optimal model with a weight of 1 and a critical threshold of 0.59 are obtained through one hundred iterations based on examining different weights and thresholds. The test accuracy and F-measure eventually reach 97.8% and 0.792, respectively. The model is then tested in predicting the 2019 Imelda flood in Houston and the results show an excellent match with the empirical flood. The results show that the model enables accurate prediction of the spatial-temporal flood propagation and recession and provides emergency response officials with a predictive flood warning tool for prioritizing the flood response and resource allocation strategies.

The performance of machine learning models tends to suffer when the distributions of the training and test data differ. Domain Adaptation is the process of closing the distribution gap between datasets. In this paper, we show that Domain Adaptation methods using pair-wise relationships between source and target domain data can be formulated as a Graph Embedding in which the domain labels are incorporated into the structure of the intrinsic and penalty graphs. We analyse the loss functions of existing state-of-the-art Supervised Domain Adaptation methods and demonstrate that they perform Graph Embedding. Moreover, we highlight some generalisation and reproducibility issues related to the experimental setup commonly used to demonstrate the few-shot learning capabilities of these methods. We propose a rectified evaluation setup for more accurately assessing and comparing Supervised Domain Adaptation methods, and report experiments on the standard benchmark datasets Office31 and MNIST-USPS.

The evil cyber-intelligence from the Matrix and a cyborg killing machine from the Terminator movies - that's what most people used to imagine when talking about the future of artificial intelligence. Today's artificial intelligence is incapable of taking over human jobs. It will not cause a robot-powered apocalypse. Ethicists and computer scientists don't see doomsday scenarios in the future, either. The future of AI holds a great deal of promise for humanity and can change the world for the better.

As companies of all shapes and sizes race to accelerate their digital transformation strategy, one important question weighs heavy: what is the future for the spare humans and how do we prevent the creation of a digital underclass? Just months into the coronavirus pandemic, everyone from chief executives to government ministers and employment charity leaders have seen the impact of digital transformation on people as well as operating models. Last year a report from the Office for National Statistics found that out of the 19.9 million jobs analysed in England in 2017, 1.5 million people were employed in jobs at high risk of automation. That was well before the current expert predictions that the economic fallout of coronavirus could see up to five million people put out of work. Chetan Dube, chief executive at IPsoft, an American multinational focused on artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive and autonomic solutions for enterprises, is well aware of the risks.

Sentiment analysis is a technique through which you can analyze a piece of text to determine the sentiment behind it. It combines machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to achieve this. Using basic Sentiment analysis, a program can understand if the sentiment behind a piece of text is positive, negative, or neutral. It is a powerful technique in Artificial intelligence that has important business applications. For example, you can use Sentiment analysis to analyze customer feedback.